


Gracious Future

by sparxwrites



Series: Lifelines [5]
Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, Goodbyes, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 17:34:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2237595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I wasn’t lying, you know,” says Ridgedog, finally. Perched atop an improbable pillar of stone left standing in the ruins, he doesn’t look down – doesn’t acknowledge Xephos’ presence at all, eyes on the wide horizon. “I would miss you if you died.”</p>
<p>(At the end of everything, Ridgedog and Xephos say what could maybe be counted as goodbyes.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gracious Future

“I wasn’t lying, you know,” says Ridgedog, finally. Perched atop an improbable pillar of stone left standing in the ruins, he doesn’t look down – doesn’t acknowledge Xephos’ presence at all, eyes on the wide horizon. “I _would_ miss you if you died.”

“You’ve got a funny way of showing it.” Xephos can’t quite keep the snapping bite of irritation out of his voice as he comes to a halt, a few feet away from the chest-high pillar, shoving his hands into the pockets of his red jacket. It’s ragged around the edges from the explosions, stained with sea-salt where he’d hastily dried it out after his dip in the water, scorches a little from proximity to lava, but it’s still in one piece.

It always is. His coat’s seen him through a lot.

Ridgedog sighs, doesn’t move. Looking closer, Xephos isn’t sure he’s even breathing. “Not really. I was trying to-” He pauses, re-thinks his words, sighs again. “You’re going to take this the wrong way,” he says, “but you mortals are so much _fun_. I just couldn’t resist.”

Xephos is pretty sure there’s been a time he’s wanted to hit Ridge more than this – because Ridge is the kind of person that makes you want to hit him on a near-constant basis – but he honestly can’t bring it to mind right now.

The knowledge that, even if he _did_ hit him, it would be little more than the most minor of irritations, is incredibly annoying.

“Half our base is missing. There’s holes in the walls, and missing or broken equipment _everywhere_ from those Notch-damned Endermen you spawned. We’ve lost- not quite _everything,_ but damn near close.” Xephos pulls a hand through the messy tangle of his hair, stiff with sweat and dried blood from the cut on his forehead, and exhales shakily. “Honeydew nearly lost an arm with that first missile. Lalna had to stitch him up. Pretty heavy price to pay for your _fun_.”

Whatever Lalna’s skills as a scientist were, they very obviously didn’t extend to medical expertise. The wound was going to scar – that much was obvious, from the unevenly spaced and sloppy stitches, from the length and depth of the ragged-edged slice into his flesh. The memory of the way Honeydew’s breathing had gone choked and rattling at the bite of the needle turns Xephos’s stomach.

“He’ll heal,” says Ridge, shrugs. “I forget how fragile you are, sometimes.”

“You could heal him,” Xephos points out, remembers how Ridge repaired him and brought him back to life as if it were nothing. A shoulder wound would be beyond easy.  
“I could,” agrees Ridgedog, and the mere fact that he says nothing more is enough to let Xephos hear the _but I’m not going to_ on the end of that sentence.

He sighs heavily, drags a hand through his hair. “You’re not going to apologise, are you?”  
“Were you expecting me to?” Ridgedog finally, _finally_ looks down, and there’s a wry smile curling at the edges of his lips, laughter in his eyes.

Xephos sighs. “No,” he admits, quietly. “No, I wasn’t. But it would be nice, after the way you-” He struggles to find the right word. “-toyed with us.”

The sudden flash of anger that crosses Ridgedog’s face is unexpected, and slightly alarming. “ _No,_ ” he says, firm and almost _worried_. “No, I have _not_ toyed with you. Played with you, maybe, but no more than you’ve played with me, or with Sips and Sjin. This might be a game, but you are _not_ pawns.”

“Toying, playing.” Xephos knows his voice is bitter, but he can’t help it. “Is there a difference?”

“Yes!” snarls Ridge, dropping off his pillar in a fluid movement that seems to not quite obey gravity, landing in front of Xephos and stepping forward until Xephos finds himself stepping backwards. “Yes, there is! The difference is between me controlling you, and you controlling yourselves – between blind obedience and free will.” Xephos finds his back pressed up against a half-ruined wall of blastproof brick, Ridge’s hands tight on his shoulders and their faces far too close together. “You’re entertaining to me, but you are _not_ my toys, and there. Is. A. Difference!”

“Ridge,” says Xephos, very slowly and very calmly. “You’re hurting me.”

Ridgedog lets go of him like he’s been burned, the anger seeping out of him. He steps back, smoothes hands down the side of his coat. “There I go again,” he says, uncharacteristically quietly. “Getting carried away.”

He turns his head, glances over his shoulder at the ocean and the horizon again, and sighs.

Xephos watches him, knows what’s on his mind and doesn’t exactly like it. Despite the fact they’d probably be a damn sight safer off without Ridge after today’s little display, there’s something oddly comforting about having someone who can fix just about any problem you care to name hanging around.

“Where are you going to go?” Xephos asks. He deliberately resists the urge to shrug his coat off and inspect the purple-blue bruises he knows must be blooming on his shoulders from Ridge’s fingers.

Deliberately avoids thinking that he, too, would miss Ridgedog if he died – even after all of this.

Humming softly in thought, Ridgedog turns back to him, smiles a little dreamily. “Away,” he says, simply, and then catches the sharp way Xephos inhales. “Not from this world,” he reassures him, grin slipping crookedly, something _almost_ like fondness in his eyes. “Just from this little corner of it. I might go build a castle…”

Guilt ices Xephos’ insides, abrupt and ridiculous considering he knows Ridgedog feels none whatsoever for what he’s done, which is so much worse than anything they have. “It was your _own_ self-destruct system that destroyed your base,” he points out, and feels like he’s protesting more for himself than anything else. “It wasn’t our fault.

Ridge looks at him, _properly_ looks at him, and laughs. For once, it’s not mocking or cruel or even amused – it’s the way a human might laugh at an ant struggling to climb a blade of grass. “Xephos,” he says, and there’s an edge of gentleness to his voice that Xephos has never heard there before. “You think I’m upset about the bunker?” He shrugs. “I’ve rebuilt- hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. I lost count. One more building lost is _nothing_.”

For some reason, Xephos doesn’t think he’s exaggerating.

“No,” he continues, sticks his hands in his pockets. “It was time for a change anyways. I mean, I’d done everything I wanted to do here, and now Sips and Sjin have left I don’t have to mediate your little disputes any more…” He shrugs again, smiles broadly. “You know what? I might go try some magic, just to make a change from all the technology.

Xephos shudders slightly, refuses to look him in the eye.

“I’ve heard about a little thing called blood magic that sounds rather interesting,” says Ridgedog, teasing in his voice that slips away into the trailing end of a sigh. “I’ll be around, Xephos. This isn’t goodbye.”

He hesitates, and then clasps careful hands on either side of Xephos head, thumbs on his temples. Tall as he is, he has to lean down to kiss to the alien’s forehead, lips curved into a smile as he presses them against the frown lines of Xephos’ brow.

His mouth catches the corner of the cut across it – the roughness of his lips makes it sting with sudden pain, makes Xephos draw in a hissing breath. He’s pretty sure Ridge did it on purpose.

“You asshole,” says Xephos, but there’s no venom behind it.

Ridgedog chuckles, quietly, lets go of him and takes a step back. “Yep,” he says, shoves hands deep into his pockets and grins a blinding grin. “That sounds like me.” His eyes catch Xephos’, hold for a second that seems to stretch out into something vast and sparkling, until Ridge breaks it by spinning on his heel, eyes to the ocean. “Like I said. I’ll be around.”

He doesn’t say _I’ll see you around_ , and they both hear the difference.

“Be careful, friend,” calls Xephos after him as he starts to walk, unable to help it.  
Ridge pauses, turns back to look at him and throws him a brief, silent salute, lips curled up at the edges. “When am I ever not?”

And then he’s gone, a breeze curling through the long grass and swirling around Xephos’ ankles. He’s not sure what else he was expecting, really, but it wasn’t this.

Not Ridge _gone_.

By the time he makes it back to the base, he’s curled in on himself a little, back rounded and shoulders hunched. The exhaustion of the earlier battle combined with his trek to and from Ridgedog’s base is just hitting him, the various aches and pains all over his body speaking up in chorus.

He pushes the door to their base open and decides he’s going to collapse into bed and go to sleep for at least a week – before remembering they _still_ don’t have beds, and the vague piles of blankets they’d been using had been ruined by grasping, clawed Enderman hands and Honeydew’s careless application of lava.

Groaning quietly, he stumbles around a corner into the main room, sits down on a chest and digs the heels of his palms into his eyes in an effort to stave off the oncoming headache he can feel building.

“Where the hell’ve you been?” asks Honeydew, a little irritable from the steady throb of his shoulder – they’ve got no healing potions out here in the middle of godforsaken nowhere, not even anything to take the edge off the pain. He’s propped up in the corner, in a nest of what few blankets they have left, Lalna perched on top of a half-melted chunk of machinery several feet from him and fiddling with the power-glove-slash-hand-replacement.

His fingers are still crimson, covered in what Xephos can only assume is either his own or Honeydew’s blood. Swallowing hard, he tries not to wonder which it is.

“Out,” he says, shortly, before relenting at the creases of discomfort graven into his friends’ face. “I went to go have a look at Ridgedog’s base, considering the lava’s cooled and the radiation’s had a chance to disperse. I wanted to see if there was anything left.”

He'd wanted to see Ridgedog, mostly, but he’s hardly going to admit to that.

Lalna looks up at that, shoving his goggles up on top of his head with still-bloodied fingers and barely seeming to notice the streaks of red he wipes through his eyebrows and over his forehead. “And?” he asks, eagerly, and Xephos finds it somewhere between endearing and alarming how quickly Lalna becomes a small child at the prospect of explosives.

“There’s nothing worth salvaging,” he says, ignores Lalna’s hiss of disappointment – they’ve already got enough missiles to last them a lifetime, thanks to the scientist’s causal disregard for his own safety. What more does he want? “Well, there’s some walls, some mycelium, but… nothing _worth_ salvaging. Ridge wasn’t there when I left. I don’t think he’s coming back.” He consoles himself with the fact it’s not quite a lie. “And Sips and Sjin are gone, too.”

Honeydew looks at him oddly. “How d’you know that?” he asks, good arm curled around his torso to press fingers against his heavily-bandaged shoulder, brows furrowed in a frown. “We’re not even sure _where_ their base is, never mind whether it’s empty or not.”

“Just… a feeling,” says Xephos, quickly – resists the urge to wince, because that _is_ a lie. “If they were still hanging around, they’d have taken advantage of the chaos to attack. They couldn’t have missed the battle, no matter where they were.”

He sees the look Lalna gives him, and knows the scientist has seen through his lie. Perhaps even knows he’d seen Ridgedog on his exploration. At least Honeydew doesn’t, though, judging by the way the slightly suspicious expression clears.

Between the state Xephos had been in after the red matter incident and the recent barrage of missiles that nearly took off his arm, the dwarf isn’t exactly _fond_ of Ridgedog. Xephos is fairly sure he’d be unhappy if he realised Xephos had been talking to him, especially so soon after he apparently tried to murder them all.

Not that Xephos is entirely sure he _did_ try to murder them.

After all, the first missile hadn’t done anything worse than make Lalna stumble dizzily around for several minutes, make him throw up in a corner when the spinning got too bad – the piece of shrapnel that had nearly maimed Honeydew had been a freak accident. The second had spawned Endermen everywhere, irritating and certainly dangerous but hardly lethal…

He thinks back to Ridgedog’s words about it all being a game, and wonders if maybe that’s what all this had been. A game.

Or maybe a test.

If this is a test, he wonders, what was it a test _of_ – and, more importantly, if the test nearly killed them then how in the name of Notch are they supposed to survive whatever it is the test is preparing them for?

(The word _Kirindave_ hangs heavy in his mind, no matter how hard he tries to forget it.)

**Author's Note:**

> aaaaand... well, that was supposed to be a wrap, but then Things happened and my brain was a little shit, and well. that's the end of this particular arc, at least, but there'll probably be other related things coming out soon-ish.
> 
> (also, this came out cuter than intended and i'm annoyed, because ridgedog you're an ancient amoral demigod, for fuck's sake. stop being so _nice_.)


End file.
